


Scrapbooks, Carried into Exile

by thatsrightdollface



Category: Hiveswap, Homestuck
Genre: Character Study, Cult of the Mirthful Messiahs, Gen, I definitely wanna celebrate the new trolls, MORE CLOWNS YESSSSS, Subjugglators, Theories, Troll Call, but I had a lot of fun with it!!, gore scrapbooking but ALSO friend scrapbooking?, guesses, there are references to Homestuck ideas/worldbuilding in here too!!, this may turn out to be very OOC
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-07
Updated: 2018-04-07
Packaged: 2019-04-19 19:02:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14243757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: Chahut Maenad decided long ago that she was going to carry her scrapbooks away with her to space, when the Empress called her for exile.  They were intricate, colorful things, splattered with almost every flavor of blood, with flowers and tiny shells and glittery splintered bone-shards pasted over the pages.  They would be a piece of Alternia, she thought, carried like a trusty hatchet propped over her shoulder and ready to swing.





	Scrapbooks, Carried into Exile

**Author's Note:**

> Hello~ I hope you enjoy this if you read it! Ahhh, I was so happy when I saw Chahut’s last name…. Dionysus’s divine frenzy, and all that. :D Lots of that imagery DEFINITELY matches what I’ve been imagining for the Mirthful Church, based on Gamzee!! I picture Chahut approaching it really differently than he might, though??? Idk. This is just for fun, of course, and hopefully it turned out okay! 
> 
> Have a great day~

Chahut Maenad decided long ago that she was going to carry her scrapbooks away with her to space, when the Empress called her for exile.  They were intricate, colorful things, splattered with almost every flavor of blood, with flowers and tiny shells and glittery splintered bone-shards pasted over the pages.  They would be a piece of Alternia, she thought, carried like a trusty hatchet propped over her shoulder and ready to swing.  So many of her brothers and sisters in faith would be sent off to different imperial ships, conquering impossibly far away worlds.  So many of her brothers and sisters in faith might grow to forget her, in time, or remember her only as “Another troll I knew, a thousand sweeps ago, blood-of-my-blood.”  But Chahut would make sure she remembered them all.  She had written their names next to their pictures, see, in surprisingly small and delicate handwriting.  Next to the pictures of their kills, too.  This snapped neck is my brother’s handiwork; these braided spines, my sister’s.  A lot of Chahut’s letters curved and spun at the edges – circus curlicues.

Those scrapbooks were piled up in Chahut’s respite block, just then, though she knew she’d have to get to packing them up sooner rather than later.  She was two weeks away from conscription, after all, and then she’d never see the dizzy spread of tangled-together stars the way they were supposed to look from Alternia ever again.  She’d never taste the sharp sting of Alternia’s sea air either, or shake her head, chuckling, as FLARP teams murdered each other in replica battle ships over the water.  Chahut wore her hair long and wild, like the Grand Highblood before her, that faithful cackling ringleader in the Mirthful Messiahs’ carnival to come.  Her steps were heavy and sure; she smiled for her family and screamed obedience to the church and its fearful Empress.  Her Imperious Condescension needed Chahut.  Needed them all, so she said. 

It was good to be needed.  It was good to know without a shadow of doubt that there was something beautiful and true in the world.  So it would be worth leaving Alternia, in the end.

When Chahut put together her scrapbooks, she was very precise and slow, just the same as she spoke.  Tender, her lips often parted just the littlest bit.  It was different, when she mangled.  When she gave herself over to the revelry and the blood.  Then, her circus act was raw and wailing, not the sort of careful dance trolls like Barzum and Baizli Soleil practiced together in fearful unison.  Then, the heat of splattered veins – the crunch of bone, the squelch of guts – was just another instrument in the pounding topsy-turvy music Chahut and her friends liked.  She was one of many, as honest as a death, as deadly as the Vast Honk to come.  She was one of many and all together their laughter could shake apart the world.

Someone pointed them in the direction of the mayhem, of the judgment, and maybe Chahut gave herself over to the blur and rhythm of it with a kind of honest joy other trolls only dreamed about.

That was, Chahut might have thought, the way things should be.  She and all her family were swallowed up in the dancing, in the ripping apart, in the worship. 

Chahut loved her friends, and she would love her matesprit if she had one.  She’d be a daring, understanding rival for a kismesis, and maybe the sort of auspitice who built bridges where no one thought they could get themselves up and built before.  She’d hold a moirail so carefully not a single one of their bones would break.  But even so, if someone had asked Chahut whether she was cruel…  Whether the heads she’d piled – with their scabbed-over unholy eyes and torn-out tongues – made her wicked…  She might have told you certainly she was.  A wicked clown, of course.  But she was also one of the divine.  One of the chosen, waiting for the end of the world.  And not waiting alone, oh no.  She had filled her scrapbooks with smiling faces, alongside the slaughtered.  She had written in cutesy anecdotes next to descriptions of the dead. 

The two might not have felt irreconcilable – divinity and so much pain.  Not after sweeps of believing she knew the Messiahs’ honest truth.  The surrender, the inevitability, the end of the world.  Chahut might have thought she couldn’t change that stuff any more than she could change the curl of her horns.  That alone might have explained the softness of her killer’s smile. 

Up in the worlds beyond, Chahut planned to fill more and more scrapbooks.  She was going to document all her hundreds of sweeps, until her blood was a dusty, stuttering thing, all the fizz and fight gone out of her.  Until she died and the Empress lived on – the Alternian Empire would flood worlds whether Chahut was there or not, and the Vast Honk would drift ever closer until there was nothing left in time and space.  

Those scrapbooks were some kind of hope, anyway, even leaving Alternia behind.  Chahut had told some of her friends about a plan to carve off a sliver of the first ship she was stationed on, for her books, and they had swatted at her arm with huge, blood-sticky claws and laughed about how she better not get herself culled.  It was hard for a purple blood righteously bound to the Mirthful Church to get ruined, to die ‘cause of an imperial order, but that sort of thing still happened, sometimes.  It had happened once or twice, even, to Chahut’s own friends…  When the Heiress Trizza Tethis got it in her thinkpan to stir the circus up a little. 

Most of Chahut’s clothes were gory and stained, and she was going to pack them up for exile just that way.  Still smelling like slaughter, like popcorn machines and deadly webs of sticky cotton candy.  Like the carnivals where she’d grown up, wandering and lost and surrendering to something bigger than herself.  Her lusus understood, she thought.  Her friends said they would miss her, and wondered vaguely if they’d see her again on a carnival ship, or maybe the prophesied paradise planet to come.  Messiahs willing they would, but Chahut believed a fair bit more in release and wildness than any manner of certainty.  What would come would come, and she would scribble it down, paste its photo nice and pretty next to a swatch of stolen hair, next to a sloppy clown-paint kiss.

Blessed by the messiahs, blessed by that bleeding, wicked world.  Exile would come, and Chahut was something at least a little like ready for it.            


End file.
